MOSS2007 Navigation

Hope you are all well. I just wanted to post an open question to the group. Ihave a system that I m working with which has various Portals, each containingsets of "Sub-Sites". The navigation is taken care of automatically for all ofthese sub sites. I also have various "Site Collections" each in their owndatabase that do not appear in the standard naviagtion. An example would be thefollowing:

Sub Portal 2Sub Site 1 - http://server/subportal2/subsite1Sub Site 2 - http://server/subportal2/subsite2Sub Site in own DB 1 - http://server/subportal2/sites/SubSiteInOwnDB1Sub Site in own DB 2 - http://server/subportal2/sites/SubSiteInOwnDB2

Sub Portal 3

Sub Site 1 - http://server/subportal3/subsite1Sub Site 2 - http://server/subportal3/subsite2Sub Site in own DB 1 - http://server/subportal2/sites/SubSiteInOwnDB1Sub Site in own DB 2 - http://server/subportal2/sites/SubSiteInOwnDB2

What I am after is some idea's of what people are doing to fix the navigationissue that arises when using seperate site colections with their own databases.If I wanted to build my own navigation that not only showed the sub sites butthe site collections what suggestions would you all have. Any best practive fromanyon here would be appreciated. Real world exampls would be great also.

As a consulting engineering company our planned deployment we do everything as aproject. Some of our projects data range from a couple of 100 MB to 200GB (perproject). So we are planning on using a seperate site collection for eachproject site under a managed path of /project/.

I plan on using the site directory to list links to all the site collections.I'm trying to work on a way to make this a bit more like our current file servernavigation, eg browse to the department and then projects and then list all theproject subdirectories.I'm finding the current site directories site template and web parts a bitlimiting but I think I can work around this.If you are not going to have too many site links in the site directory, or itemsin a choice type column then out of the box this could work for you. You mighteven want to look at turning on the self service site creation.

The other thing that I am doing is the reverse navigation.So I have created a project site template and set the root site collection asthe portal site collection.I have a simple example and screenshot on my blog about this (sorry gratuitousplug of my new blog).blog.gavin-adams.com/.../The advantage of this is that it will provide a bread crumb trail back to theroot site collection in the top left corner.

I haven't tried this, but I would assume you would need to create awebpart or a server control that would start at the existing site andbacktrack to Farm context of the current site. That way you could builda list of Web Applications and Site Collections in the Farm. You couldalso enumerate peers to the site and children of the site. We used todo this in CMS 2002 to create a control called a Compass.

I was noticing while developing a master page in SharePoint Designerthat global navigation uses a data provider. Would it be conceivable todevelop a feature that has perhaps a site directory (as suggestedbelow), but also a data provider that other sites can consume from. Thendevelop another feature that requires the first feature and consumesthat data provider in other sites? I suggest pairing features up just soit would be easy to integrate them into any new sharepoint installation,and to make sure the data providers always matched.

Some developer who likes this idea but codes better than me, don'tforget to fire back a solution cuz I'll probably be starting on it,about the time you make your first million off the solution file.

Thanks for this. Much appreciated. In the exact scenario I have I wouldstruggle to create this. In the current structure I have shown below, I have afull structue of sites, sub sites and even more subsites (all based on thepublishing template). I have then created "private" collaboration sites (basedon the Team site Template).

These are created as Site collections within their own datadases. I need theirparent to be one of the "Sub Sub Sub Sites". I can do this manually but we havemany Private sites which would need the following to happen:

1. Either use a site template (similar to what you have) - not sure I would knowwhat the parent is as this would be different for each site collection2. Go into each site collection and manually add the portal link connection tothe specific parent "sub sub sub site"3. Go to the parent "sub sub sub site" and add a link back to the private sitewhich is audience targetted by a sharepoint group in the "sub sub sub site"

I have tried this approach and it work fines, but that was for one site.I don't fancy doing all of them!!

What would be nice is to simply create either a feature or customSiteMapProvider that could simply loop down the site collections underneath aspecific root portal and add them to the navigation where needed after doingsome clever validation of where it should exist.... hmmmm!! might have to bootup Visual Studio!!

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